


Solely in My Chest is My Heart a Drum of Water

by lonewytch



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alien Planet, F/M, Introspection, Melody Pond - Freeform, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-04
Updated: 2012-05-04
Packaged: 2017-11-05 05:13:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/402805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonewytch/pseuds/lonewytch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Berlin, the first thing River Song does is run and run.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Solely in My Chest is My Heart a Drum of Water

**Author's Note:**

> Words in bold are from the song iamundernodisguise by School of Seven Bells.

_River...no...what are you doing?_

_Hello sweetie..._

****

**  
**

** I am neither breather nor speaker **

At first, after Berlin, she runs.

The second her bare feet hit the cool, slick hospital floor, they itch to stride forward, to move so fast and hard that the press of the soles of her feet and the momentum she gathers will set this planet spinning faster underneath her.

But, for the first time in her life,  she doesn’t do it because she’s afraid and running from something (the shadowy faceless ones that wrapped their way around her dreams, the voice of a woman that scrapes like sandpaper.) She doesn’t do it because there is a path she wishes to follow (the scent of Time laid across the earth - the path he leaves behind him wherever he goes.) She doesn’t do it she has somewhere she wants to run to (Amy, Rory, held warm in the golden haze of the fields of Leadworth.)

She does it because she can, because she isn’t afraid now, because she has no path to follow, nowhere she’s trying to get to. She does it precisely because she doesn’t have to run. She does it for the sheer joy of running.

She walks from the white interior and the clinical smell of the hospital and out into a bright sun, her fingers gripped tight around the dusky blue notebook and its dangling red ribbon, and she laughs at the daylight rippling across her skin. She lets her eyelashes flutter closed and explores the warmth spreading over her skin, where it feels different to before, how it feels different in this body. She tries her new form, stretches out days of convalescence, squeezing it from the fibres of her muscles and feeling blood pulse into them.

It’s just a small matter to acquire a vortex manipulator. Someone with her training need not fear all the tricks and trades of the black market. Though the traders at the local haunt there laugh at her slight frame and small hands, she soon stills their tongues and has someone handing one over to her. The black strap wraps her wrist snugly before a day has passed.

She moves through time and through space then, and she has no need of a companion or of a mentor. It’s like the fresh sun across her again as she realises over and over that for the first time she is free of everything that ever bound her before.

**  
**

As she moves across time, a Vortex Manipulator fizzing and popping at her wrist, she avoids all the places where she knows there are those with voices that form a coherent language - human, alien or otherwise. She does not need the voices of others now, and she does not need her own for the time being either. She packages it, boxes it down inside her and she sinks herself down into a silence that is lapped away at only by the myriad sounds of the variety of planets she chooses to visit.

**  
**

** I am neither walker nor sleeper **

She chases the night and the day across the sky on many planets. It is a easy for her to run and run along mountain tops, over sand dunes, across grass, through dust, to let the wind catch and drag at at her hair as she goes. She follows the beating of her feet and where they take her, she anchors herself in their thudding path across a thousand different landscapes. She moves like this until her lungs begin to burn, jogs until they don’t, and then she begins to run all over again. She etches out the patterns of strange constellations across a thousand blasted or fertile landscapes.

She never stops moving as flocks of violently coloured birds move over her, as waves crash and wash around her feet. Her lips become cracked and dry. Her eyes are washed out by the sight of many suns. She wonders if all the green is leached out of them, if it runs from her eyes to stream into the grass that she sometimes watches moving beneath her.

When she stops to sleep, she dreams. Sometimes she is wheeling and then hovering as if she is a bird, glimpsing herself from above, she dreams she is a steady pair of hazel eyes watching  herself from up there as she crosshatches her way over the multitude of landscapes.

Sometimes in her dreams there are pathways and trackways that lead to meaning, somewhere amongst all those strange terrains, she seeks them out in her sleep and when she finds these pathways they burn the bright gold of the vortex, and they always lead back to a box of the brightest blue.

Sometimes, though, her dreams are darker, and she stands at a crossroads with a gun in her hand, gallows hanging darkly over her and a sleek grey hound, fur like sand blasted platinum, sleeping at her feet.

**  
**

**I am neither sister brother son nor daughter**

In the solitude, and in the absence of anyone’s words wrapping their way around her and confusing her mind -  she relearns herself as she is now. Against the metronome of her own feet,  she finds that she is all new. It is not only this body, this sleek and honed thing that carries her forward day after day, that is new to her. It is new inside her too.

She finds that the bitterness of the past is being washed clean by the strange air of many planets; it rises up and peels away from her as if she is shedding an old skin. Memories that soured her before, of nights curled up alone while her own parents slept safely in their beds - the thick darkness wrapping and cosseting them from the reality of who she was  - no longer sting like hail against new skin. The anger in her at how He had denied her a family through his own stupidity, that anger always coiled so tight, always ready to spring out and lash to the bone - it begins to slumber as if the deserts she runs through are composed of sleeping dust.

The darkness in her stays - it will always stay, it’s etched into her soul, she knows this - but it subsides a little, it sinks away like a tide from a shore and she watches it drift down deeper inside her and rest there, at least for now.

Eventually, something begins to take its place. This something is rooted in the memory of the moment she stepped away from a dying Doctor, and across the threshold of the Tardis. A moment when every nerve inside her had ignited in a bone deep knowledge of everything that machine had been/was/would be . It had been an understanding of that mad box so profound, and a blaze of light so glorious that she had felt first like her hearts would burst, and then like her flesh would turn to an ash which would drift forever in the amber light of that strange room.

  
But, instead, she had carried on breathing, and the blaze had died down to become a steady glow inside her whose light hadn’t really dimmed since.

She feels something inside her taking root inside that steady and unwavering glow, and it feels strange to her, and it feels utterly _wonderful._

She thinks it’s probably called _Love._

**  
**

** Solely in my chest is my heart a drum of water **

In the life that now recedes as quickly from her as countless horizons at her back, her hearts had beat out his name only. Over and over they had pressed it roaring past her eardrums, in a punching rhythm composed of fear, hatred and fascination.

But now there is a new name that is pushed on and out by her binary hearts, that works its way from artery into vein, to capillary, and that seems to spread its way across her skin. She begins to suspect that with each heaving breath, she takes it in from the air that whistles past her. She thinks that perhaps it crosses the thin walls of her lungs to be caught in the red flow inside her. And maybe, just maybe it’s a name that while she is not running to , it is one approaching steadily as relentlessly as the glide of a planetary system around its mother star.

This name is the name of water, but it’s not the still deep pooling of deep well, rather it is the dance of a water that flows, whose ripples change constantly as it journeys ever onwards towards some unfathomable source.

_River._

**  
**

** I am under no disguise **

True, gut deep wrenching love that lovers share is something unfamiliar to her. She has shared nights with others for the sake of undemanding company and undemanding sex. She’s probably broken her fair share of hearts. Yet she has never really _loved._

Yet somehow now it begins to feel as familiar as a memory of the slide of cool lips across hers. Now it begins to sheath her past, it brings out her true face, it is her eternal compass through the night.

When she realises this, she finally stops.

It’s some nameless planet out in a forgotten star system. She’s probably the only sentient life that has ever set foot here. It is dark, but there are stars laid out brightly against the darkness above her. She can see her breath in the cool air, and she watches the ghost of it being expelled from her lungs and blooming bright across deep blackness and the thousands of stars above.

If she imagines it just right, lets her eyes drift a little out of focus, the misting of her breath merges with the stars before her eyes and becomes a sparkling gold display of life force leaving her. It becomes like the moments when every life she would ever have had after this one, left her body. And oh how she had burned on that day in Berlin. So bright. She was a secret at the heart of a supernova, she was the mystery of the primordial soup of particles that washed up at the beginning of everything. She was the mystery of both death and then life granted again with a kiss; the second kiss for the sake of the woman whose name flows through her now and carries her on into the future.

She breathes out over and over, watches her breath again and again, and still she doesn’t even come close to knowing the name of regret. Because although the gold always burning under her skin and the slow ripple of time inside her is gone now, it is replaced by something else.

She knows both its name, and hers now too.

The next destination she sets her coordinates for is Earth’s moon. When the suspicious looking admin assistant asks for the name of the bedraggled and exhausted looking woman she is handing application papers to, she tells her;

_I’m River Song._ ** **  
****

 

 

 


End file.
